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 Rediscovering Christianity as an adult

 
 Rediscovering Christianity as an adult



 













Smooth and flat, grey, brown and white,
Winter and summer, noon and night,
Tumbling together for a thousand ages,
We ought to be wiser than Eastern sages.

In a simple, practical sense, we gain wisdom from reflecting on and learning from experience. Life is rich experience, and children, if their environment supports it, engage in active, motivated learning.  I remember when my son learned to crawl. He would wake up, eat, and spend the rest of the day vigorously exploring the house, at least until he needed to eat and rest again. Watching him, I learned that curiosity is a potent source of energy, akin to food and sleep. Boredom, conversely, is painful and enervating.  
Adulthood is traditionally a time when we begin to consciously reflect on and wrestle with our experience. Most of us do this in stints and starts, as we’re soon committed to the weight of adult responsibilities. This, in turn, brings its own set of new experiences and learnings.  
I returned to church in my early thirties, having grown up in both Catholic and Anglican traditions before “going East” for almost a decade in my twenties. I found a church that worshipped in a circle, as the traditional “tram tracks” church arrangement – the altar, priest(s), and colourful shiny things ‘up there’, the congregation seated in military-like pews ‘back here’ - left me feeling stiff, tense, and cut off from a fuller sense of the holy. The traditional seating arrangement felt like being back at a school assembly:  be good girls and boys, sit still and listen to the grown-ups, stand when you’re asked to, read the words they’ve prepared for you when you’re asked to. It represented so much of what I find difficult about traditional understandings of God and humanity. A circle, on the other hand, felt like a fulfilment of what Christianity calls the incarnation – God amongst us all.
The church I ended up in – St Luke’s in the City, now destroyed by earthquakes – gathered in a seated circle for the first part of the service, what my Catholic upbringing called the liturgy of the word, before heading up into the sanctuary and gathering around the altar for the liturgy of the sacrament, or what my kids simply call ‘bread’.
Hearing scripture read every week from the Lectionary (the systematic schedule of Bible readings that Catholic and many Protestant churches follow throughout the year) is a bit like Russian roulette: you never quite know what you’re going to hear, and sooner or later you’ll be hearing one of those passages that make you squirm, or perhaps even feel quite disgusted and repelled.
The Lectionary forces us to wrestle with all of Christian tradition, rather than just keep reading the passages of love and light. The famous Biblical passage of Jacob wrestling with God (Genesis 32: 22-32) is both strange and surprising. Jacob, the son of Isaac, is on a journey back to Canaan. Alone, he encounters a man at night who wrestles with him until dawn. Jacob puts up a tremendous fight: the man is unable to overcome him, and instead strikes and dislocates one of Jacob’s hips. Jacob still holds on! The man seems afraid of the approaching light: “Let me go for the day is breaking”. Jacob refuses until the man blesses him.  The man asks for Jacob’s name and then renames him Israel: “…for you have striven with God and humans and prevailed.” Jacob asks for the man’s name but never gets it. The man – or God – then leaves. Jacob renames the place Penuel, “for I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.”
Might this story suggest something about how we engage with religion as adults, including how we might read and engage with its sacred texts?
Our modern mind tends to want to know ‘the facts’ or ‘the truth’, or to decode something ‘strange’ very quickly so we know ‘what is really going on’ and, in a sense, feel ‘in control’ again. Before the modern age, Western  Christianity spoke of the need to read sacred scripture on multiple levels and specified four in particular (‘the four senses of scripture’): the literal or historical (what a text is explicitly saying), the allegorical or symbolic (what are the major symbolic meanings and how this affects belief), the moral (what a text means for how I live my life and act), and the anagogical or contemplative sense (what a text might spark off in terms of deeper awareness).
If a text really ‘strikes’ me, I find it useful to take it away and wrestle with it for some time. Let it tumble over inside me – stop taking in too much of the rest of a sermon, or another bible reading, or the many thoughts that keep going around and breaking in. Let other things darken away. Perhaps read a little about the text’s context and history, but not too much. Allow space for something spontaneous to arise, perhaps very quickly, perhaps rather gradually and darkly (over the course of ‘a night’); and if it feels significant enough, to not let the process go until it blesses me with true awareness, one hallmark of which is a sense of being surprised.
Surely the point of religion is transformative encounter with the divine.  Perhaps Jacob’s story offers some pointers for our own experiential journeys. We will meet God directly, if we hold on through the tumbling process. We will break – or need to break – taboos in the process. This may be painful and wounding, perhaps permanently so. Our senses, our body, can take this in – beyond what our language can fully describe.

Smooth and flat, grey, brown and white,

Winter and summer, noon and night,

Tumbling together for a thousand ages,

We ought to be wiser than Eastern sages. 

In a simple, practical sense, we gain wisdom from reflecting on and learning from experience. Life is rich experience, and children, if their environment supports it, engage in active, motivated learning.  I remember when my son learned to crawl. He would wake up, eat, and spend the rest of the day vigorously exploring the house, at least until he needed to eat and rest again. Watching him, I learned that curiosity is a potent source of energy, akin to food and sleep. Boredom, conversely, is painful and enervating. 

Adulthood is traditionally a time when we begin to consciously reflect on and wrestle with our experience. Most of us do this in stints and starts, as we’re soon committed to the weight of adult responsibilities. This, in turn, brings its own set of new experiences and learnings. 

I returned to church in my early thirties, having grown up in both Catholic and Anglican traditions before “going East” for almost a decade in my twenties. I found a church that worshipped in a circle, as the traditional “tram tracks” church arrangement – the altar, priest(s), and colourful shiny things ‘up there’, the congregation seated in military-like pews ‘back here’ - left me feeling stiff, tense, and cut off from a fuller sense of the holy. The traditional seating arrangement felt like being back at a school assembly:  be good girls and boys, sit still and listen to the grown-ups, stand when you’re asked to, read the words they’ve prepared for you when you’re asked to. It represented so much of what I find difficult about traditional understandings of God and humanity. A circle, on the other hand, felt like a fulfilment of what Christianity calls the incarnation – God amongst us all.

The church I ended up in – St Luke’s in the City, now destroyed by earthquakes – gathered in a seated circle for the first part of the service, what my Catholic upbringing called the liturgy of the word, before heading up into the sanctuary and gathering around the altar for the liturgy of the sacrament, or what my kids simply call ‘bread’.

Hearing scripture read every week from the Lectionary (the systematic schedule of Bible readings that Catholic and many Protestant churches follow throughout the year) is a bit like Russian roulette: you never quite know what you’re going to hear, and sooner or later you’ll be hearing one of those passages that make you squirm, or perhaps even feel quite disgusted and repelled.

The Lectionary forces us to wrestle with all of Christian tradition, rather than just keep reading the passages of love and light. The famous Biblical passage of Jacob wrestling with God (Genesis 32: 22-32) is both strange and surprising. Jacob, the son of Isaac, is on a journey back to Canaan. Alone, he encounters a man at night who wrestles with him until dawn. Jacob puts up a tremendous fight: the man is unable to overcome him, and instead strikes and dislocates one of Jacob’s hips. Jacob still holds on! The man seems afraid of the approaching light: “Let me go for the day is breaking”. Jacob refuses until the man blesses him.  The man asks for Jacob’s name and then renames him Israel: “…for you have striven with God and humans and prevailed.” Jacob asks for the man’s name but never gets it. The man – or God – then leaves. Jacob renames the place Penuel, “for I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.”

Might this story suggest something about how we engage with religion as adults, including how we might read and engage with its sacred texts?

Our modern mind tends to want to know ‘the facts’ or ‘the truth’, or to decode something ‘strange’ very quickly so we know ‘what is really going on’ and, in a sense, feel ‘in control’ again. Before the modern age, Western  Christianity spoke of the need to read sacred scripture on multiple levels and specified four in particular (‘the four senses of scripture’): the literal or historical (what a text is explicitly saying), the allegorical or symbolic (what are the major symbolic meanings and how this affects belief), the moral (what a text means for how I live my life and act), and the anagogical or contemplative sense (what a text might spark off in terms of deeper awareness).

If a text really ‘strikes’ me, I find it useful to take it away and wrestle with it for some time. Let it tumble over inside me – stop taking in too much of the rest of a sermon, or another bible reading, or the many thoughts that keep going around and breaking in. Let other things darken away. Perhaps read a little about the text’s context and history, but not too much. Allow space for something spontaneous to arise, perhaps very quickly, perhaps rather gradually and darkly (over the course of ‘a night’); and if it feels significant enough, to not let the process go until it blesses me with true awareness, one hallmark of which is a sense of being surprised.

Surely the point of religion is transformative encounter with the divine.  Perhaps Jacob’s story offers some pointers for our own experiential journeys. We will meet God directly, if we hold on through the tumbling process. We will break – or need to break – taboos in the process. This may be painful and wounding, perhaps permanently so. Our senses, our body, can take this in – beyond what our language can fully describe.